Design System
A shared collection of reusable tokens, components, patterns, guidelines, and documentation maintained by an organization to build products consistently. Design tokens are typically part of a design system’s foundational layer, encoding the visual decisions that everything else is built upon.
Purpose
Section titled “Purpose”A design system reduces duplicated effort across teams by providing a single source of truth for how a product looks and behaves. Tokens contribute to this by giving every team a shared vocabulary for design decisions, making it possible to apply changes consistently across an entire ecosystem from one place.
Note
Not every organization that uses design tokens has a formal design system, but the principles of token management — shared ownership, consistent naming, layered tiers — reflect the same goals that design systems are built around.